


Waveforms

by liquidCitrus



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Houston Spies (Blaseball Team), Math and Science Metaphors, neurodivergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27628232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: There is a bitter irony, Math thinks, in how more variables could be referred to as more "degrees of freedom", as if that's a good thing, when Math desperately just wants to make the problem a more manageable size.Math struggles with the death of teammates in Math's own, unique way.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	Waveforms

_pregame ritual: hallucinations_

* * *

To Math Velazquez, the world is waveforms. Sound, pressure wave. Light, electromagnetic wave. Look from far enough above as a traffic light turns green at a busy intersection; the drivers only move after the ones in front of them perceptibly move. Chants spread out, rippling, from a source. Whenever a large group tries to clap along to a rhythm, they inevitably end up speeding up, and eventually what was supposed to be a beat breaks up into scattered applause.

But blaseball is messier, and it's in that complexity that things get interesting. Pay attention to the way that the batter's eyes flick back and forth, the direction the wind shifts. Notice the tiny divots in the field that would trip one up if not accounted for. Don't let teammates get too complacent after wins, or too despairing after losses.

For a few minutes before every game: imagine delicate, shining crystal shapes, interlocking Platonic perfection, calming. And then turn away from them, to face the world that is so much more complex, and all the more fascinating in its complexity.

* * *

Then the moon rises, and the umpires' eyes burn.

* * *

It becomes a game of chaos and uncertainty. Dickerson Greatness disappears before Math's eyes. Later, so does Miki Santana. Lives, gone. Plans, scuttled. The team's morale craters to an unprecedented degree. What if Denzel is the next to disappear? Or Marco?

Math does not give up trying. Surely the probabilities can be massaged, the randomness contained. The plans will just have to be more complex, is all.

This hope recedes into the distance as the number of constants shrinks, and then shrinks further as feedback swaps enter the equation. There is a bitter irony, Math thinks, in how more variables could be referred to as more "degrees of freedom", as if that's a good thing, when Math desperately just wants to make the problem a more manageable size.

* * *

These days, instead of those shapes, Math's conceptual mind's eye instead begins to drift backwards in time.

Math remembers how Miki asked for help with marking the fingerboard of a fretless guitar, and they spent an afternoon looking at references about tuning systems. She'd been so excited to start composing microtonal music, new combinations of sounds that would resonate in people's minds and hearts.

Math remembers how Dickerson once tried to propose to Math that ropes between posts hung in the shape of parabolas. Math spent many spare moments calculating all the physical forces involved, approximating its shape with chain-links and then working towards the limit of a continuous rope, only for Dickerson to climb in through an air vent a few days later with a physics textbook that called the shape a catenary.

There are hundreds of these tiny interactions, each one reminding Math of the many moments that should have followed them, and each one a stab of pain as Math comes to at the cry of "Play ball!" and realizes that they will never be there again.

* * *

There's this joke Math has heard more than a few times. Old computers responding to impossibilities with a "does not compute". There's this voice some people say it in, the one they think is funny, the one where they hold the same pitch and say it all robotically while making stiff motions.

This one's saying it at 330 hertz. Approximately the note Miki called E4 on a piano keyboard. Easier to try to place the tone on a scale than to actually comprehend what they're saying.

Tune back into the conversation. The other individual is apparently parsing Math's silence as a blank stare. "Come on, it was just a joke!"

Math leaves without another word.

* * *

Alexandria Rosales is one of the few who can actually use force on the concept of math. There they are, hauling Math bodily away from the computer terminal where Math is trying to make it fit together, trying to get the numbers to match, trying to figure out who to put where on the lineup in case of another incineration.

Math lies on the floor. Alex asks why Math is doing this. Math avoids answering the question. This is in itself an answer.

"All of us feel helpless right now," Alex says. "Everything has gone wrong and it's still getting worse. It sucks. But please, _please_ , don't spend all your time obsessing. It's not good for you and it's not good for the team."

How could it be anything other than good, to plan for contingencies?

"You haven't been present, lately. Your focus has been slipping. You haven't been doing any of your usual tinkering. You haven't come up with any new ideas. We're worried."

And ah, there it is, the discontinuity in the function, the reason this derivative will never, ever work out. It is important to be well-rounded, as a researcher; to have a base of experience broad enough to draw new connections and think of problems in new ways. But Math has become so fixated on trying to control for the danger of the game that there's no room left in Math's consciousness to think about anything else.

Alex sits on the ground next to Math, and puts a gentle hand on one of Math's local maxima. "Hey. Let's bring you back a little. Something simple. Grounding. Hmm... can you list the small prime numbers? Up to a thousand."

So Math lies there and recomputes the Sieve of Erastothenes from scratch: remove all the multiples of two. All the multiples of three. All the multiples of five. All the multiples of seven. Eleven. Thirteen. Math used to find it too simple, this method of finding prime numbers, but it's just occupying enough to chase the other numbers away.

* * *

To Math Velazquez, the world is waveforms. Bases loaded, and then the grand slam emptying them out, transforming them into runs. The stitches in a regulation blaseball, threads weaving in and out in a repeating pattern to hold the two pieces of leather together. The influences of people in each others' lives ripple outward, minds meeting and then leaving each other behind, never quite the same afterwards.

Before games, now, Math reads from a prepared list of problems to visualize, rather than letting Math's mind settle on whatever it bothers to settle on. Today, Math contemplates the probabilities of dice throws. The graphs of the probability distributions draw themselves in Math's mind.

The Spies haven't had a player incinerated recently. Others would be far more worried about that, but Math knows that the gambler's fallacy means that just because today is lucky does not mean that tomorrow is unlucky. Just because the probability distribution looks like that, doesn't mean that you can predict, from this position, where the dice will land next. It's a sort of optimism.

And Math wakes to the cry of "Play ball!"


End file.
